Author
Topic: Whats the haps?

Perhaps it was rude of me to include the "snarky" comment in my post. If that's the case, then I apologize.

That said, I was airing a legitimate complaint about the administrator's direction of the community prior to that, and frankly I don't see what's rude about it given the fact that Discord wasn't intended to replace the forums, but seems to have done just that.

And complaints are fine. But you can use both the forums and the discord, that's all Star wanted you to do when he said to come join us, he didn't ask you to leave the forums.

No one is replacing the forums, they aren't going anywhere, but the issue isn't that we need to fix it. The issue is newer gamers, new blood doesn't care for old school forums. You are not going to see new people here very often. It just won't happen, the trend has changed and as such we as a site need to adjust as well. We get 3-4 new people on discord a day, they may not join in the convo but they probably enjoy being part of the community. RPGFan started in an age where "online" reviews were a new thing and print media dominated. That print media adjusted to the online format and those that didn't died. And now we need to the same thing. That's all the Discord/Twitch/Twitter is.

The boards aren't going anywhere, but they're dying, and have been for some time.

But really, here is my biggest beef: I don't want to jump into Single-Player RPGs on Discord and be confronted with one long thread of conversation. I want to be able to go into various topics people have started and discuss those topics in their own, self-contained thread, as I can on the forums. Honestly, I'd be perfectly okay with Discord, or some other service, replacing the forums so long as they maintained that functionality, and I think new users would appreciate that as well.

And please don't think I don't care about growing the community. I may not be respected amongst the community like Neal is, but I've put a lot of time into this community, and I want to see it thrive in a way that works for old and new members alike.

Ok if you want certain channels for games, we can do that. I mean Neal(Dincrist) came right in today and added the Books channel, and everyone was like this is a great idea. We can do that for certain games/series. We are always open to suggestions like this. I know for a fact we do this for new games and movies already. We had to do it for Trails series almost permanently because we always talk about it.

Just ask, I am around 75% of the time and Star is around the other 25%.

And I do respect your time to the community. I want nothing more then you do, to see it grow, but sometimes it sucks and we need to try new stuff. I sit on Twitch 5-6 hours almost every night for this reason alone.

Discord doesn't really click with me either. I'm in a very different timezone compared to most people here, and it always feels like I'm late to the conversation in chats. The forums feel more laid-back.

And good point about time zones, Tomara. I don't think many of us even thought of that.

As for haps... how about World Cup today, eh? Japan and Senagal upset Colombia and Poland! Japan's win makes me forgive that one bullshit penalty call the ref made against Japan that gave Colombia its goal. If Japan breaks my bracket, I will only be too happy.

And meh to Russia dominating its group. They're in a milktoast group anyway and once they and Uruguay make it to the next round, they'll both be iced by powerhouse teams like France or Belgium.

« Last Edit: June 19, 2018, 06:11:48 PM by Dincrest »

Logged

You can brag about your 5000+ friends on social media all you want, but riddle me this: how many of them would help you move?

Perhaps it was rude of me to include the "snarky" comment in my post. If that's the case, then I apologize.

That said, I was airing a legitimate complaint about the administrator's direction of the community prior to that, and frankly I don't see what's rude about it given the fact that Discord wasn't intended to replace the forums, but seems to have done just that.

More people using Discord is not "the administrator's direction". As a non-administrator who uses Discord I find a little insulting. People are choosing to use Discord because they want to use Discord. Nobody made anyone do anything. You are essentially just complaining that there is a more popular alternative.

I still think the forum has its place. They are different forms of interaction, but for day-to-day chewing the fat kind of stuff I do prefer Discord. However then I made that really long post about the GPD Win 2 (which nobody responded to...) deliberately on the forums because I figured it was something other people might want to reference in the future. I could see doing the same thing for game impressions and the like as well.

I don't want to see the forums die either but it's true that they were in decline even before the Discord thing was started. I would much rather have Discord than nothing.

@Kevadu I think you hit the nail on the head for how I see it. I just want to offer people an alternative. I've been on this forum for 10 years now. I joined when I was a teen and through my posting here got to become a member of staff 7 years ago. I made most of my online friends here, and it was making me sad that as time was moving on, people were coming to our forums less and less.

We held a survey and our readers said they didn't like using forums any more. I can't FORCE people to like it, but I did want to keep our community together, so I thought Discord was a great idea and I really went through a lot of trouble to make it successful. In the beginning I was staying up to 5am my time and getting up to work at 7am. I put thought into how could I ease peoples fears of it being a replacement by purposefully engineering the channels to be a different beast entirely.

Anyway, those are just my thoughts. I just wanted to make it clear I NEVER wanted to hurt the forums. And to prove my street cred, here:

It's not splitting the community, it's just growing it. Discord is better then the forums, it allows more people to join and quicker. That's the way it is, the reason it seems disorganized to you is because more people are talking there then have in years here. If there was actually people posting here then you would be saying the same thing about the forums. And yes many people hate the forums as well because you have to sign up for it and then do the whole email thing, where most gamers already have a discord account and use it for multiple communities.

Discord is new, it's here to stay if you want to be a grandpa and not try something new because "I grew up with this and won't try anything new" then so be it. I have 1820 posts on this forum, 1800 of them are in the administration side for News, which even we stopped using 2 years ago. I love talking to the fans of the site but I never posted here. I post all the time on Discord, its just way more convenient and fun.

Edit: And no I wasn't making anything up here, we took a survey from the readers this was there response and yes so many people didn't like the forums but suggested something else - http://www.rpgfan.com/news/2017/6769.html

Called it.

The forums started going downhill in terms of activity a long time ago, I get it. But Discord can't replicate or even emulate the forums' functionality, and I don't understand why there weren't other options to pursue than Discord that would have been more capable of recreating the forums' functionality. What I like about the forums is they encourage sustained conversation, are typically less chatty, and allow division into topics so that multiple conversations can be sustained at the same time on various topics, like Single-Player RPGs for example. If I want to talk Fire Emblem on Discord, I'd have to jump into an already active conversation about another game (or something else entirely) rather than have the ability to start a new topic, or join one already in place. Sure, you can jump in and try to change the thread of the conversation on Discord (and possibly have little success in doing so), but I'd much rather have the option to jump from one topic to the next as in the forums. Per the news story you linked (which I did read back in October btw): "That said, it's officially an item on our roadmap to try and integrate the forums better, since even something as simple as a "popular on the forums" widget will bring more attention to the community." What happened to that? And it's clear by the other posts here that there's more than a few "grandpas" who don't like Discord, and prefer the forums, so I can't see why you'd call it anything but splitting the community, especially when a number of longtime, respected members of the RPGFan community, like Neal, say they prefer the forums.

I agree with this. Discord discussions kinda feel like drive-by posts that can be easily derail the current conversation. One minute I'm talking about Final Fantasy 9, the very next second I'm somehow talking about music in Wild Arms.

There are two kinds of fool. One says, "This is old, and therefore good."And one says, "This is new, and therefore better."

My complaint with discord is that most of the conversation happens during the day, while I'm at work. In the forum format, if I want to reply to an old comment, I can quote it for context, even a few days later. In discord, that's pretty much impossible. You step in the stream, but the water has moved on.

But, I like the people in the community (most of you, anyway) more than I care about the details of the communication medium. I guess I can hang around both places.